On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:41 PM, Chris Wilson <cwilso@google.com> wrote:
> Actually, Henri, you're conflating Flash (or Silverlight) availability with
> "known licensing terms for DRM module". That's not actually true, for two
> reasons - first, that Flash (or Silverlight) is not universally available
> beyond desktop systems, and secondly, just having Flash doesn't mean that
> Flash-DRMed content is universally available. (E.g., much DRMed content was
> blocked on Google TV, despite having the Flash runtime.)
I think it's you—not me—who is conflating the licensing of the module
itself and whether content providers are willing to target the module.
The licensing of Flash Player and Silverlight is a known thing
(including it being known that they are unavailable in many cases). I
have no illusions that having Flash Player available made different
platforms equally targeted by content providers. See
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013Feb/0019.html
The "type of device" part of
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013Feb/0153.html
strongly suggests that EME won't solve the problem Google TV faced.
Currently, browsers within the Windows platform have roughly equal
opportunity to host Silverlight and Flash and browsers within the Mac
OS X platform have roughly equal opportunity to host Silverlight and
Flash. And Netflix targets Silverlight apparently without
authenticating its host browser. (Netflix works in unofficial builds
of the Firefox code base, for example, and NPAPI doesn't provide a
trusted way to authenticate the host anyway.) On the other hand, on
Android, Netflix is equally unavailable in all browsers and all
browsers have equal opportunity to send intents to the native Netflix
app. On desktop Linux, Netflix is equally unavailable in all browsers.
The current situation is that the playing field is unlevel among
operating systems. At least for the time being (when it's unknown what
CDMs there will be, how they will be licensed and which services will
target which CDMs), EME poses the threat of unleveling the playing
field for browsers even within operating systems in addition to
keeping the playing field unlevel among operating systems.
--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fihttp://hsivonen.iki.fi/